Contents

Early life

Born as Maila Elizabeth Syrjäniemi, she claimed to be the niece of the Finnish athlete Paavo Nurmi, who began setting long-distance running world records in 1921, the year before her birth. She moved to the United States with her family when she was two years old and grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio, home to the largest Finnish-American community in Ohio.

Arriving in Los Angeles at age 17, she modeled for Alberto Vargas, Bernard of Hollywood, and Man Ray, gaining a foothold in the film industry with an uncredited role in Victor Saville's 1947 film, If Winter Comes. She reportedly was fired by Mae West from the cast of West's Broadway play Catherine Was Great in 1944 because West feared that she was being upstaged. [2] On Broadway, she gained much attention after appearing in the horror-themed midnight show "Spook Scandals" in which she screamed, fainted, laid in a coffin, and seductively lurked about a mock cemetery. She also worked as a showgirl for the Earl Carroll Theatre and as a high-kicking chorus line dancer at the Florentine Gardens along with famous stripper Lili St. Cyr. In the '50s she supported herself mainly by posing for pin-up photos in men's magazines such as Famous Models, Gala and Glamorous Models. Before landing her role as Vampira, she was working as a hat-check girl in a cloakroom on Hollywood's Sunset Strip. (Source: Filmfax, no. 13, Dec. 1988)

Origin of Vampira

The idea for the Vampira character was born in 1953 when Nurmi attended choreographer Lester Horton's annual Bal Caribe Masquerade in a costume inspired by a character in The New Yorker cartoons of Charles Addams. Her appearance with pale white skin and tight black dress caught the attention of television producer Hunt Stromberg, Jr., who wanted to hire her to host horror movies on the Los Angeles television stationKABC-TV, but Stromberg had no idea how to contact her. He finally got her phone number from Rudi Gernreich, later famed as the designer of the topless swimsuit. The name Vampira was the invention of Nurmi's husband, Dean Riesner.

On April 301954, KABC-TV aired a preview, Dig Me Later, Vampira, at 11:00 p.m. The Vampira Show premiered on the following night, May 11954. For the first four weeks, the show aired at midnight, moving to 11:00 p.m. on May 29. Ten months later, the series aired at 10:30 p.m., beginning March 51955. Each show opened with Vampira gliding down a dark corridor flooded with dry-ice fog. At the end of her trance-like walk, the camera zoomed in on her face as she let out a piercing scream. She would then introduce (and mock) that evening's film while reclining barefoot on a skull-encrusted Victorian couch. Her horror-related comedy antics included ghoulish puns such as encouraging viewers to write for epitaphs instead of autographs and talking to her pet spider Rollo. She also ran as a candidate for "Night Mayor of Hollywood" with a platform of "dead issues." In another publicity stunt, KABC had her cruise around Hollywood in the back of a chauffeur-driven 1932 Packard touring car with the top down, where she sat, as Vampira, holding a black parasol. The show was an immediate hit, and in June 1954 she appeared as Vampira in a horror-themed comedy skit on The Red Skelton Show along with Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, and Lon Chaney Jr. (Source: FILMFAXplus, April/June 2007). That same week Life magazine ran an article on her, including a photo-spread of her show-opening entrance and scream.

When the series was cancelled in 1955, she retained rights to the character of Vampira and took the show to a competing Los Angeles television station, KHJ-TV. Several episode scripts, and a single promotional kinescope of Nurmi recreating some of her macabre comedy segments, are held by private collectors. Several clips from the rare kinescope are included in the 2006 documentary Vampira: The Movie.

Nurmi made television history as the first horror movie hostess. In 1957, Screen Gems released a syndicated package of 52 horror movies, mostly from Universal Pictures, under the program title Shock Theater. Independent stations in major cities all over the U.S. began showing these films, adding their own ghoulish host or hostess (including Vampira II and other lookalikes) to attract more viewers.

The classic clip from Plan 9 from Outer Space featuring Vampira walking out of the woods with her hands pointing straight out, was used to start the original opening sequence of WPIX Channel 11 New York's Chiller Theatre back in the 1960s.

Personal life

Nurmi was acquainted with Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, and briefly dated Orson Welles. In the early 1950s, she was close friends with James Dean, and they spent time together at Googie's coffee shop on the corner of Crescent Heights and Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. She explained their friendship by saying, "We have the same neuroses". Dean commented, "I have a fairly adequate knowledge of satanic forces, and I was interested to find out if this girl was obsessed with such a force."[3]

On June 20, 1955, Nurmi was the victim of an attempted murder when a man forced his way into her apartment and proceeded to terrorize her for close to four hours. Nurmi eventually escaped and managed to call the police, with assistance from a local shop owner.[4]

Marriages

She married her first husband, Dean Riesner, in 1949,[6] a former child actor in silent films and later screenwriter of Dirty Harry, Charley Varrick, Play Misty for Me and numerous other movies and TV episodes. She married actor Fabrizio Mioni on 20 June 1961 in Orange County, California.[7] She had no children.

Later life

Maila Nurmi as she appeared in the 2001 documentary Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies

By 1962, Nurmi was making a living installing linoleum flooring.[8] “And if things are slow in linoleum, I can also do carpentry, make drapes or refinish furniture,” she told the Los Angeles Times.

In the early 1960s, Nurmi opened Vampira's Attic, an antiques boutique on Melrose Avenue. She also sold handmade jewelry and clothing. She made items for several celebrities, including Grace Slick of the music group Jefferson Airplane and the Zappa family.

In 1981, Nurmi was asked by KHJ-TV to revive her Vampira character for television. She worked closely with the producers of the new show and was to get an executive producer credit, but Nurmi eventually left the project over creative differences. According to Nurmi this was because the station cast comedic actress Cassandra Peterson in the part without consulting her. "They eventually called me in to sign a contract and she was there," Nurmi told Bizarre magazine in 2005. "They had hired her without asking me."[9]

Unable to continue using the name Vampira, the show was abruptly renamed Elvira's Movie Macabre with Peterson playing the titular host. Nurmi soon filed a lawsuit against Peterson. The court eventually ruled in favor of Peterson, holding that "'likeness' means actual representation of another person's appearance, and not simply close resemblance." Peterson claimed that Elvira was nothing like Vampira aside from the basic design of the black dress and black hair; Nurmi claimed that the entire Elvira persona, which included comedic dialogue and intentionally bad graveyard puns, infringed on her creation's "distinctive dark dress, horror movie props, and...special personality."[10] Nurmi herself claimed that Vampira's image was in part based on the Charles AddamsThe New Yorker cartoon character "Morticia Addams", though she told Boxoffice magazine in 1994 that she had intentionally deviated from Addams' mute and flat-chested creation, making her own TV character "campier and sexier" to avoid plagiarizing Addams' idea.[11]

In 2001, Nurmi opened her official website, and began selling autographed memorabilia and original pieces of art on eBay. Until her death, Nurmi lived with her pet cat and two birds in a small North Hollywood apartment.

Unlike Elvira, Nurmi authorized very few merchandising contracts for her Vampira character, though the name and likeness has been used unofficially by various companies since the 1950s. In 1994, Nurmi had authorized a Vampira model kit for Artomic Creations, and a pre-painted figurine from Bowen Designs in 2001, both sculpted by Thomas Kuntz. In 2004, she authorized merchandising of the Vampira character by Coffin Case.

Films and Documentaries

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), Ed Wood's infamous film. A DVD release in 2000 from Image Entertainment contains a bonus two-hour documentary Flying Saucers Over Hollywood: The Plan 9 Companion with extensive interviews with Nurmi and other cast members. Another DVD containing both a colorized version and a digitally restored black and white print was released by Legend Films in 2006.

Ed Wood (1994), Tim Burton's bio-pic features actress-model Lisa Marie as Maila Nurmi. The film also recreates parts of The Vampira Show.

About Death, Sex and Taxes (1995) - a Finnish documentary about Nurmi by Mika J. Ripatti.

The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood Jr. This 1995 Brett Thompson documentary about the life and films of Ed Wood also includes a recreation of The Vampira Show.

American Scary (2006) a documentary about local late-night horror movie hosts includes an interview with Nurmi.

Vampira: The Movie (2006) Kevin Sean Michaels' documentary includes interviews with Nurmi, other horror film actors, and Cassandra Peterson, who briefly describes the 1981 Elvira/Vampira lawsuit. It also contains clips from the rare kinescope of The Vampira Show made in 1954. This movie was released on DVD by Alpha Video.

Awards

In popular culture

In 1985, the Los Angeles horror-punk group Sid Terror's Undead (band) fronted by Sid Terror (a long-time friend of Maila Nurmi) began performing the song "Vampira Goes To Hollywood" based on Maila and her Vampira character. It was reportedly Maila's favorite Vampira song. The song was later recorded and appeared on the bands 1997 album "The Melted By The $un Sessions".

In 2004 the Moon-Rays recorded "Blues For Vampira" on the "Ghouls Go West" CD.

In 1958, singer Bobby Bare recorded a song about Nurmi's character entitled "Vampira."

The New Jersey horror-punk group The Misfits also recorded an original song named after and based on Nurmi's character. Versions of the song date to 1979, but it was not released until 1982 on their first full-length LPWalk Among Us.

London Punk pioneers The Damned paid homage to Vampira with the track "Plan 9 Channel 7" on their 1979 album Machine Gun Etiquette.

The Devin Townsend Band had two songs, "Vampolka" and "Vampira", on the album Synchestra. "Vampira", the first single from the album, was made into a music video.

The minor Simpsons character Booberella is an obvious play on either Nurmi's character Vampira, or the more buxom Elvira as played by Cassandra Peterson, given her low-cut top (and other blatant references to her breasts), stereotypical "Horror" accent, and being the host of a horror film television channel.